Not the day to buy a lottery ticket

This morning, stretchy pants on, tee shirt on, weights and water bottle in hand, I jumped in my two-year-old car to head off for a much-needed session at the YMCA.

I pressed the start button and suddenly more flashing lights than a Vegas slot machine blazed in front of me, accompanied by threatening dings and beeps.

          Brake Malfunction!! blazed across the dashboard.

          The car refused to start, and beeped and dinged more with every attempt. I would not be going to exercise class today.

          It wasn’t even happy when I exited, still dinging at me after I’d shut the door, and the rear brake lights refused to go out.

          Meanwhile, my dive into my registration packet (which I needed to access Honda’s roadside assistance program) revealed that I’d been driving an unregistered car since March of 2020. What!?? We’d registered the car in Florida, where we’d acquired it, and a call to the dealer steered me to an on-line registration service. Zip, zip, zip, and $200 later I had a registration due to arrive in three days. Easy-peasy.

          I arranged for a tow, which arrived a surprisingly short hour and a half later. One look at the driver made me wonder how far back the car seat could go, but somehow he wedged himself in, decided it was likely just the battery, and after a jump from his handy battery pack my car hummed back into life, although the pinball-machine of dashboard lights still went on blinking.  

          Discretion being the better part of valor, we decided not to risk things going flooey on the way to the Massachusetts dealer and asked him to tow it anyway.

          In a brief moment of calm, I took another look at the registration packet. Uh oh. From a back pocket I pulled out yet another registration card, this one stating that we were good until March of 2022. I frantically entered a request into the registration website to disregard the first order, but didn’t receive an answering response. Finally, I managed to extract a phone number from the fine print at the bottom of the site’s page and was thrilled to find myself speaking to a human, so what if he had an accent so thick I found myself squinting to understand him.  Yes, of course he would cancel the order, and no, not to worry because the system wouldn’t permit him to register a car twice.

          The dealer called to say they’d received the car, and it would be ready by the end of the day. The battery is covered by the warranty, and my $200 is staying in my pocket. Phew.